


If all the world were apple pie

by lotesse



Series: If all the world were apple pie and all the sea were ink [1]
Category: Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Baking, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Feminist Themes, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 04:19:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17379428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: It was not yet dawn when Ged woke, shaken, in their bed in the house of Ogion. Beside him in their bed Tenar lay sleeping, beautiful bright-shining dragon-wine-in-the-mouth Tenar, but he did not turn to look at her. In his dream, the spectre of Elfarran had had Tenar's face: Tenar's face as it had been when he'd first met her as a girl on Atuan, pale and weighed down with the heavy black inky fall of her hair, and she had wailed as the old gods he'd called up by his hubris had eaten her.





	If all the world were apple pie

It was not yet dawn when Ged woke, shaken, in their bed in the house of Ogion, cradled high in the crags of Re Albi on the island of Gont. Even in that greatest of sanctuaries he was shaken, his breath coming short and his spine curling in the safe enclosing space of the early dark. 

Beside him in their bed Tenar lay sleeping. He could feel the heat and weight of her body beside him, beautiful bright-shining dragon-wine-in-the-mouth Tenar, but he did not turn to look at her. Through the window he could see the horizon paling at the day's approach. 

In his dream she had wailed as the old gods he'd called up by his hubris had eaten her. The spectre of Elfarran he had seen this time had had Tenar's face: Tenar's face as it had been when he'd first met her as a girl on Atuan, pale and weighed down with the heavy black inky fall of her shining hair. In his dream she had cried her voice away and then gone silent for ever. 

At least, he thought in anguish, when he'd been a boy, simple and arrogant, he'd been untroubled by dreams. He remembered his childhood slumbers as pure dark seas, a straightforward negation of consciousness a relief and respite until the next moment of wakefulness. Now, in his late middle age, there was too much decayed matter in his mind, the memories of beauties and horrors seen and done, things known and things only guessed at. After he'd gone down to the Dry Land and passed from it again, the dreams had clustered thick and fast around him, clinging with a wearying static charge.

It took all his strength to turn and look to where Tenar slept. Her white face was strange and luminous to him then in the morning half-light; every bit as radiant even as it had been to him in the deepest dark of the world. Her long dark hair, shot through now with silver grey, was wrapped around her throat like strangling fingers. 

Ged shuddered as the dark memory intruded on his thoughts, the voices seeming to whisper from the corners of the room – _widow up at the farm, white all over she is, Karg-like … they do say white flesh is sweet, eh ho? Teach the Karg-bitch a lesson_ – and then the cruel laugh, and – _Flint might've been soft but women don't soon forget _my__ – and then the worser obscenities, more loud male laughter, the scene strange to him, still a virgin then even after decades of life as a man, but familiar too from his long knowledge of exclusively masculine groups and their ways – 

He tore himself up out of the warm nest of their bedding then, swinging his bare feet down to touch cool stone and waxy fleece. He couldn't, he couldn't bear it. He was infected by panic and memory. 

He would go out and walk on the mountain, the mountain that was changeless and silent and still, and perhaps then his mind would quiet too. 

His sandals – he needed his sandals, it was too early in the spring for his bare feet to bear the ground. 

He could not bear to sift through the domestic detritus of their home, his and Tenar's, and Therru's, not with what was in his mind and heart. What was he to do?

Tenar did not stir from her slumber. Ged, stumbling, found his shoes beside the door.

Mares'-tail clouds swooped up over the old worn mountains, heralding high winds in the upper air. Spring had come to Gont, and was nearing finish; soon summer would arrive. 

Standing stronger now, his shod feet still strongly rooted in the earth before the threshold of the house, Ged ran his trembling fingers through the wiry gnarl of his hair and looked up at the far height of the sky, grounding himself again with projected warmth and reassuranc. He touched fingertips to forehead, temples, trying to minister to his disturbed mind as he might have quieted a distressed child.

The first time he had dreamed of Elfarran, it had been in this place; long ago. The house of Ogion, it had been then in truth. When he had lived there as a boy, Tenar had not yet given him the knowledge of his master's true name; and so that was the only name he had known for the place. Then, too, he had waked to cover his eyes with shaking hands, still haunted by the nightmare in the daylight hours. He had hidden the dream from Ogion, only allowing his distress to escape in little hisses through the dark; his master, ever wiser than he, would have been an unbearable witness to his belated shame. 

Now, so many years later, Ged could look back on that boy's distress and feel pity for him, and at the same time he also found that he could see the errors that had been present even in the proper and genuine feelings of guilt that had eaten his child-self. Looking back, he saw both the lesson learned and the lesson failed: in order to reconcile with the gebbeth and vanquish the power of its shadow, it had been required of him that he relinquish his bitter resentment of the boy Jasper; and he had done it, coming sincerely to regret his stupidity and arrogance, his false instinct and easy assumption; but although he had felt shame then for his excessive display of force, it had taken him longer to understand the full measure of the wrong he'd done to Morred's lady, when he had called up her incandescent soul as a staging-ground for his foolish schoolboy pissing games.

He thought again of Jasper – just a child, as they had all been only children. But Therru, too, he thought, had been a child, and even as a child, she would not have been surprised by a man's easy belief that her body was an open space for him to transact upon. Tenar had known it too, from the very beginning. His surprise at the thing was only another occasion for shame, shame that he had not cared to learn the burdens carried in the world by others.

It seemed to him that he mages of Roke had been poor teachers to them in that way. There had been no women in their groves and halls, and it had been easy for them to consider the lady only symbolically, if at all. They had primed him well, if not for his action then for the direction he had taken, had given him the chauvinism necessary to consider someone so great in song and story as she as a fit thrall to his flexing youthful will to power.

The dew was chill on the late spring grass; his sandals had grown damp as he had ascended the narrow goat-path, abstracted in his mental churn. 

He looked at Therru's sapling peach tree as he passed it, and saw that it was getting ready to bud. 

There would be berries in the patch, and he directed his steps there. He found them, bright and red, still pale enough that they would taste tart. Their juice stained his fingers as he pulled them from the stems.

He looked out from the high place over the island, the place he had returned to, that had first been and would finally be his home. “After all,” he said aloud, voice soft in the hush of the morning, “we are only poor creatures.”

He turned then and made his way back down, down the path and across the garden and through the door, returning once again to Tenar's side as she slept in the still early morning of their home.

He checked Therru in her bed, but she still was quiet, yet unmoving.

He washed the berries and put them in a wooden bowl, and went to the room where Tenar yet lay sleeping. She had turned so that her hand rested in the concavity where his body had been, and her face was wholly hidden by her hair.

He mouthed her name, but did not say it. Ged put the bowl of fruit down on the stone of the floor, kneeling beside in on the sheepskin rug that did not quite cushion his knees enough, not anymore, and leaning close cupped his hand around her sleep-heavy head, so that her warm cheek rested against his palm, strands of black and silver falling back to show him the bones of her sleeping face one again.

She stirred against his hand, dark lashes moving. When her eyes blinked open, he was in her immediate line of sight, and waking, she smiled. “Good morning, love,” she said. “You're up early.”

“Good morning,” he answered, soothed beyond measure by the warmth of her smile, the quiet promise of another day in her waking. “It's going to be fine. I've brought you some breakfast,” he added, offering up the bowl with a smile of his own.

“Early indeed,” she said, taking the berries, popping one in her mouth, and looking at him shrewdly. “Couldn't sleep?”

He leaned in to kiss her berry-red lips. “I'll sleep when I'm dead,” he answered. “Until then, I've too much to – to be grateful for, to recompense. There is no reason, no reason at all, why I should have been spared, after all that I've seen and done, for such a perfect happiness as this.”

She blinked. “I'm glad you're happy,” she said, evidently somewhat taken aback. “You do deserve it, love. All beings do, I think – but you, you in particular, have poured out your love into the world, and so love comes back to you. It is not unearned.”

Gruffly, he objected, “I've been a fool. It is.”

“You've been human,” she insisted. “It isn't. Now let me up, I need the outhouse.”

He gave way, and she pushed herself up, still in her white nightdress. After a moment of hunting, he found her shawl and slippers, and, placing the one in front of her, wrapped the others around her shoulders, leaning in for another kiss.

“I'm going to bake a tart,” Ged told her. “The berries are early still; they need sweetening.”

“ _I'm_ early, and still need sweetening, you mean. You'll get no argument from the child!”

As the adults moved around the house, Therru emerged from her nest, like her mother blinking and rumpled after her sleep. She found Ged in the kitchen, setting about cutting cold butter into his pastry. 

“Hello, little mouse,” he said to her. “It was a good sleep?” She nodded, and came over to watch his work. “Later,” he said, “we should go and water the peach tree. I was there this morning, picking berries, and I think it will be ready to bloom soon.” She nodded again, and Tenar came in, too. When the tarts were finished, they each ate too many, grinning around the great wooden table at each other with their teeth and faces stained pink-purple, like those of strange and magical beasts. If it was a penance, Ged thought, he surely hoped it would be enough to balance against his sins; there was little pain in it, but much love, offered to these women who were the greatest teachers of his soul.


End file.
